


Legislacerator in Training

by Sermna



Category: Homestuck
Genre: College, F/F, IN SPACE, Legislacerator Training, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-07
Updated: 2014-01-07
Packaged: 2018-01-07 19:39:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1123622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sermna/pseuds/Sermna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, things are sweeter the second time.</p><p>“TRAINEE PYROPE. You have 5 hours to track and capture TRAINEE TERENS alive. If task is completed before time is up, return to ship with captured trainee. If task is not completed, you will be collected and punished. Bear in mind: TRAINEE TERENS is also attempting to capture you.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Legislacerator in Training

**Author's Note:**

  * For [negativecosine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/negativecosine/gifts).



Troll beer is typically fermented inside the crystallized remains of a certain species of grub that have been bred to produce particularly thick shells when they molt. The art has lost some of the finesse that was once associated with it since the kids have been put in charge of it, but the grubs mostly raise and kill themselves and the beer isn’t difficult to make, so it usually works out fine as long as no one tries to implement any quality standards. Some trolls, usually the sort that wear hats at all times and eschew military jobs, claim that different grubs produce different tastes, but those trolls are Elitist Assholes and can generally be cheated out of exorbitant amounts of money. Cheap beer (or else lowblood beer) was once characterized by stray legs and antennae, and any rags-to-riches troll with even the slightest hint of sentimentality will reminisce about how one wasn’t home until everything smelled like grubloaf and the beer crunched in your mouth. In a hilarious cultural switch-swap, this kind of down-home thinking became very popular with a new breed of troll youth (it has more protein!) and now you will find artfully mixed grub leg beer in any well-to-do hive.

The pre-law trolls who were still growing into their fangs and feet were not really highbloods but also certainly were not lowbloods, and whatever drinks they had were mostly poorly brewed, lacking in crunch, and in some cases lethal (“-that’s alright, oh, that’s fine,” one very worn out troll was telling the host, “it’s okay that he’s dead. Lousy roommate, you know, left his shit everywhere-”) and one student in particular was slurping it down in positively alarming amounts. That student was you.

“Pyrope!” your roommate slams herself into you like maybe she intended to knock the drink out of your hand. She failed miserably, and you take another very long and very enthusiastic whiff of it. It’s bright red, the reddest red, which you think is very interesting because as far as you know it’s supposed to be green. “Pyrope,” she says, very slow like she’s having trouble with the words, “you are going to die.” She has snappy consonants and is very obnoxious, qualities that some think make her very compatible for you. You might agree except for the way that her very presence burns up your snout like bleach.

“Hello Terens,” you say crisply, which is difficult to manage when your tongue is like a slug between your teeth. The lights are flashing in sharp soda-fizzles of color, green and purple, and your boots are very tight on your feet. This party is in celebration of the people (at least those still alive) passing your first exam, which in bald terms mostly tested your ability to avoid being eaten by the judge. To most it probably smells like troll sweat (known for a high amount of lipid fats) and booze, but to you it smells delicious; most of the attending trolls didn’t even bother to scrape themselves out of their teal and red uniforms. Their horns are like sharp citrus spikes pointing to the ceiling, which is in turn ashy gray hastily covered in the most blueberry of blue streamers. You are slightly uneven on your feet but very far from drunk. You slip an arm around Terens and make sure your fingers are digging straight into one of her kidneys. “I can assure you, my death will involve significantly more weapons and yelling. And maybe a dragon.”

“Dragons aren’t real,” she says, but she’s bitten your arm and is already slipping away from you in the haze of dimly gyrating trolls. Someone is yelling something about turning off the corruscating light apparatus, but he is quickly quieted with a beer shell over the head. You wonder what the death count is so far.

You push and claw and guilt trolls out of the way until you find a sofa that looks like maybe it was chewed by someone’s lusus and sink into it. It’s  other occupant, a very pale looking troll with blood bordering on green, pays you no mind while you dump the rest of the beer all over his leg. You have no fucking clue why you did that.

gallowsCalibrater [GC] began trolling twinArmageddons [TA]

GC: 3V3RYTH1NG 1S SO GR34T R1GHT NOW YOU H4V3 NO 1D34

GC: 1 4M 4T TH3 P4RTY!

GC: 1 TH1NK TH1S GUY N3XT TO M3 1S D34D

GC: H3 SM3LLS L1KE PRUN3S >:/

TA: are you drunk?

TA: my 2uper 2peciial p2ychiic abiiliitiie2 tell me you are.

GC: YOU H4V3 NO SUCH TH1NG!

GC: 4LSO 1 4M NOT DRUNK

GC:  4 L3G1SL4C3R4TOR WOULD N3V3R 4LLOW H3RS3LF TO LOS3 H3R M3NT4L F4CULT13S L1K3 TH4T >:O

GC: TH4T S41D

GC: TH1S B33R 1S D1SGUST1NG

TA: 2o 2top driinkiing it, dumpa22.

You are just thinking of a witty way to tell him to fuck off when someone decides that it would be a really groovy idea to slam their hand into your head, and for a split second you’re almost decided on flipping around and chomping a finger or two before you get a good whiff of something acrid. You know that smell, it’s something Vriska was very fond of, she always did like explosives. You know exactly how dangerous that shit is. Shortly after your recognition the hand is followed by a body and you are crushed into the couch. Before anything else you take an experimental lick of the body smashed against you and taste that your savior is Terens. She turns to glare at you and she’s got a salt burn of anger in her eyes.

“What is-”

“Stay down,” she hisses, and in that second the entire south wall is blasted down. The only thing that keeps you from getting sprayed with shrapnel is the saggy old couch you’re currently pressed into, and above you Terens makes a low sound that you somehow hear clearly over the wild shrieks of the surrounding trolls.

You allow her three seconds to shrug off her pain before you start in with questions.

“Why do you taste like grapefruit,” you ask, attempting to turn your head so you can get another lick. She responds by elbowing you in the gut with a grunt.

“You are so fucking weird, Pyrope.”

She rolls off of you and loses her balance for a second, but this corner of the room is empty except for the rubble on the floor (you guess that troll wasn’t dead after all) and she quickly straightens up, jerks you up by your arm, and starts to pull you to the exit. You’ve never seen her so urgent, nor so helpful. It’s pretty nice of her, you think, and more than a little pale. That could be interesting, probably.

You’re stumbling hard, and she seems pretty tipsy herself. You have no idea what’s going on, and why you’re having such a goddamn hard time walking in your modest one inch heels, but if you sniff kinda hard you can catch the occasional whiff of Teren’s smugness while she stumbles ahead of you, which is extremely attractive, if not confusing. Everything else is just headaches and burnt blue streamers. She doesn’t stop dragging you until you’re back in your dorm on the other side of the building, and then she stops to breathe deep and grin at you, a gesture that is maybe lost on you because you are still very drunk and all you can think about is, holy shit, that was so cool. Your first college party, and it blew up!! So cool.

Maybe she knows you’re not up for a proper conversation because she turns to take off her boots, and she somehow manages to do it with no swaying or anything. You can’t even really complete thoughts right now, and you keep forgetting where your hands are. You stumble to your smooth metal recuperacoon (impersonal, lightly heated, dorm norm) and plop right in, uniform at all, not completely intentionally. You get burning sopor in your mouth, all over your chin, which is such a stupid wriggler mistake. You’re thinking of being ejected from the ship for being unable to complete basic tasks like “not ingesting sopor” when a single, cool finger dips down to wipe the goop away from your mouth.

Oh fuck, what the actual goddamn fuck.

You make a sort of choking sound, which you imagine is very attractive, but she doesn’t stop, not until she wipes away all the soper and scrapes it onto the edge of the recuperacoon. You give a very quiet sniff and her face is right in front of yours, snout to snout, and for once she isn’t being obnoxious. She brings up the hand she’d used to wipe away the sopor and paps you very, very softly on your cheek. You are now fully immobile, you are effectively dead. Terezi Pyrope is dead and her corpse is being gently caressed by a very pretty and very gentle troll in uniform. You never knew you wanted this. You shift deeper into the recuperacoon, and reach out to touch Teren’s face, but-

she isn’t there.

You twitch your nose, searching her out, and you find her across the room by her own smooth metal recuperacoon. Her head is ducked so that her hair swoops over her face, but everything from the crooked lines of her horns to the way her feet are planted radiates smugness.

You briefly consider drowning yourself, except you totally told her that your death would involve a dragon and you fully intend to live up to that. Instead, you wiggle your way further into the slime and fall asleep.

-

TA: you diied diidn’t you.

TA: you totally diied and left me two deal with kk and hii2 en2uiing biitchfiit, how could you.

You have stale sopor glooped into your hair and in every goddamn crack of your handheld huskpad. Luckily, it was build to take worse abuse than that, and still works, but the keys stick something awful and you’re not fit for typing much anyway.

GC: 1 4M NOT D34D BUT 1 WOULD L1K3 TO B3

Terens is already gone, and you are wondering if maybe last night was a dream, except she lefts ghosts of herself on your face, in your hair. Stupid risky cocky Vriska-

Oh. Oh no.

You rub hard at your face and groan. Terens isn’t Vriska, you aren’t pale for her and you weren’t for Vriska either, so shut up, let it go, you’ve got class tonight.

It’s not your fault they have the same smile.

Your corner of the dorm consists of the modestly sized sopor tub (very lightly heated; most trolls here are at least teal, but no higher than a modest clear blue), a metal desk with your husktop and a myriad of papers held down with brightly colored paperweights resting on top, and a metal trunk filled with various (and spare) belongings. You own two uniforms, each identical. The one you’re wearing is disgusting, but your spare is slightly too big for you and tends to bunch at the elbows and hang unflatteringly on you. You drag yourself into the shared ablution block with clothes on and everything, and comb out chunks of crystallized sopor. You are a wreck, and you have training in only a few hours, yay. After that, you have a paper over impromptu disguise due, and you haven’t even started. Your eyes are itchy.

When you’re dressed and presentable and shiny-horned you bust out of your dorm like you own the whole goddamn joint. There is no one in the hallway to see you, but you feel better anyway.

Docking room 12B is clear on the other side of the ship, and when you arrive the four other trolls in your unit are already present. You don’t know any of them very well, but you can match name to horn so that’s good enough, you guess. You fall into place at the far right of the line and stare neatly ahead of you. One advantage you have: you can be “looking” anywhere and still be able to know what’s going on in the entire room. You know before anyone else when your supervisor comes in, and the instant her foot steps into the room you give a snappy “good night, Instructor Destri.”

“Good night, Trainee Pyrope,” she returns, and with some satisfaction you hear every troll in line give a slight jump. There is a moment of silence as she takes her place before you, directly in front of the docking doors. Everything is spacious and metal, this docking station is for cargo, not passengers. The floor gives the occasional shake, like a lumbering beast below you. You are obviously close to landing. The troll besides you almost stumbles, and even you lose your balance a few times, but Destri is like a cocoon fixed to the floor. Her gaze is sharp, her blood just touching cerulean.

“Tonight,” she says, her voice young enough to make her comfortable to you and just spiked enough to make her not, “we will be boarding Planet 45G2, previously inhabited almost entirely by a race of creatures that strongly resemble antlerbeasts, now eradicated. We will be testing both your evasion and your tracking abilities in tonight’s outing. My only advice to you: avoid the water if you can help it.”

At the last word of her speech there is a hard tremor and you are landed. Destri gives a curt command into her grubpad and then steps aside. The doors open onto a strong, cold night wind and the distant sound of rushing water, and the ramp descends.

“Begin,” she says.

-

As per usual, your assignment appears on your grubpad after you have seperated yourself from the group. You are surrounded on all sides by huge trees, and below you the ground is soft and springy. It is extremely cold, but that is the least of your concerns. You are too busy being annoyed by your task.

“TRAINEE PYROPE. You have 5 hours to track and capture TRAINEE TERENS alive. If task is completed before time is up, return to ship with captured trainee. If task is not completed, you will be collected and punished. Bear in mind: TRAINEE TERENS is also attempting to capture you.”

Of course you’d be stuck with Terens, and you aren’t even on the same unit! That means that there are at least ten trolls on this planet, possibly more. Your instructions are very vague, but that is not entirely unexpected; legislacerators are known for their ingenuity and skill, and those things are not learned when too many instructions are given.

You were told to stay away from the water. Is it icy cold? Likely. Strong currents? Possibly. Dangerous inhabitants? Wouldn’t doubt it. But those things wouldn’t normally be advised against. If you couldn’t figure those things out yourself, well then, you were useless weren’t you? So what else could water do?

You give a hard sniff and groan. Even after the shower Teren’s scent sticks to you and makes you think about the feelings she’d stirred up in yo-

Of course, you’re an idiot! You love it.

You’ve got her scent.

-

You decide to go back to the ship, first. She’ll have come from one of the docking stations by yours, so you follow your own steps back over fallen branches and thick vegetation until you’re met with the smooth metal front of the ship. Docking doors line the entire bottom half of the ship, but while the doors are all closed, the ramps remain planted on the ground in front of the doors that were used. The metal crushes small plants underneath it, and you decide to take its example and get on your knees. You smell many interesting things, but it’s not until the third door that you find the scent you’re looking for- Terens! Here is where you’ll need to be careful. She’s looking for you, too, and while she may not have your very impressive sense of smell, she does have her eyesight and you have to admit she is very clever. There is something a little odd, though- intermingled with her scent is that same acrid smell of explosives that was present at the party. That could be something to watch carefully for. You sit back on your haunches and think about what you want to do.

You’re not sure how you’ll catch her, she’s bigger than you and you have no tools, but you can figure that out later. For now, you’re going to locate her.

You walk carefully along the line of the ship, staying low to the ground. You’re noticeable in your uniform, but so is everyone else so you suppose it doesn’t really matter. Her scent weaves in and out of the heavy smell of grass and smooth wet mud, but more conspicuous is the smell of explosives. You hadn’t really thought very hard on who had blown up that wall at the party, or why, nor how Teren’s had known when to protect you. You supposed it all fit together pretty easily.

It’s awful, really, how closely she resembles Vriska. Not only in attitude, but something in her looks as well- tall, with bony fingers and small hips, a deceptively soft face and glittering eyes. Her hair is smooth though, and her horns crooked, but these differences only serves to make her seem like a reincarnation, as if Vriska had died and rebirthed as a troll with blood only a few shades greener. You shiver a little at the thought, because it almost seems plausible. You don’t know where Vriska is, you don’t even know if she’s alive-

“Psssst.”

You almost jump a foot, and then you hit yourself with every mental abuse possible. What the fuck were you thinking, waxing all sentimental over Vriska when you had an assignment, and now you’re going to be fireman carried all the way back to the ship and punished just like all the other captured trainees-

“Yo, Pyrope, look at me,” Terens whispers, somewhere in the deep pool of shade from the ship.

“I’m blind,” you whisper back.

“Oh duh. Anyway, c’mere.”

You wrinkle your nose, she’s totally ruining her advantage here. She could’ve already nabbed you, and probably been the first back! It’s almost disrespectful.

You creep closer, and by now your calves are really starting to burn with all this crouching you’re doing. It takes you a second to sniff her down, and then you notice something very strange.

Beside her is a corpse, a troll. There’s no way it’s not a trainee.

“Okay,” you say slowly, “Is there a reason for that or do you think this is just fun?”

“He attacked me!” She hisses.

“So you slit his throat?” You’re starting to get a headache. This is all too familiar, you’re not sitting on a foreign planet next to Terens and a dead trainee, instead you’re on the shoreline on Alternia, and a seadweller lay dead between you and Vriska-

_I had no choice, he was going to spear me!!!!!!!!_

_Maybe that would’ve been better! This is illegal! We could be hanged for this-_

_Stop playing lawyer, I know what I did! I’d do it again!_

You’d looked down at the violet running down the sand in wet clouds and had felt something entirely new, something vicious and exciting. It’s why you’d taken up FLARP, there was no law in FLARP, nothing to keep you from this-

“Terezi! Stop daydreaming, help me figure this out!”

Terens is right in front of you again, and you’re suddenly overwhelmed with the urge to help her in whatever way you can. It’s only with great willpower that you keep from stroking her face.

“Okay. We’ll take this to them, dummy,” you say. In all honesty a trainee death was not particularly fretted over, even though fighting among trainees was technically forbidden. “Grab his head.”

She stares at you for a moment, uncertain, and then something happens that breaks your heart the tiniest fraction: she follows your orders. Here is where she differs from Vriska, you think. Here is where she changes. You grab the trainee’s feet and then-

Teren’s hand is around your neck.

“I will win over you,” she says very quietly, “every time.”

You have nothing to say. The trainee’s foot slips from your grasp.

She kisses you on the lips, once, softly, and then she starts to drag you back to ship. You offer no resistance.

-

That morning you lay naked in your recuperacoon and think empty thoughts. Your husktop is balanced on the edge, and you have an essay half written on it. It’s due in the evening and you have no energy to finish it.

Terens is in the room, but she’s not saying anything and you aren’t either. Sleep eludes you. Your lips still burn.

Your punishment ended up being light, a kilometer run and then no dinner. Terens, however, had been whipped for the dead troll, even if her trap had been approved of. She’d come in with a bloody back and clouds in her eyes and you’d only watched as she stripped down and set her recuperacoon to its lowest setting. Sympathy mingled with sullen resentment and in the end all you could do was lay there.

If you’re being perfectly honest, there’s one thing you’d like very much, and that is to see if Vriska is even alive. It’s a shitty idea, but it’s been a shitty night and you are so done with all this angst.

gallowsCalibrater [GC] began trolling arachnidsGrip [AG]

GC: H3LLO

GC: VR1SK4?

GC: 4R3 YOU D34D

You wait around for a while but she’s not answering so you guess that’s that. She doesn’t want to hear from you. She’s probably got her own pirate ship by now, her and that stupid metal arm, thinking she’s all cool. Maybe you’ll see her trial one day. Maybe.

You decide to start writing on your essay again (The Effects of Garroting: Part 2) when Terens gives a very gentle sigh.

“What’s her name?” She asks. Your snout sniffs hard, but there’s no malice in the question, and altogether too much knowing. “The troll who I remind you of, what’s her name?”

“...Vriska.”

 “My girl was named Vedris. She was small, like you, but with branched horns instead of your pointy ones, and her blood was olive. She was so sharp. And she put up with me. I loved her-”

“Shut up!” you say. You don’t need to hear this. You don’t need to tell her how her every move is Vriska’s, how she smells like her and thinks like her and made you love her like Vriska did. You really fucking don’t.

“What, you don’t want to hear it? Fess up Pyrope! You’re pale for me, and I’m pale for you, why don’t you just accept it and let me have you?”

You sit up, suddenly livid. “Is one time not enough for you? Were you not burned enough? Because let me tell you, my girl actually burned me, burned the eyes right out of my head! Your words smell good Terens, but the idea behind it stinks.”

She’s staring at you, eyes all hot like peppers, and god fucking damnit you love her, or maybe you just love Vriska, but what does it even fucking matter?

“Fine,” she says, and turns her back to you.

-

You can’t focus on your test. The questions blur together into a burnt lump of sugar, awful to the tongue and utterly unanswerable.

You get up and turn in the blank paper, slicked with your saliva, and rather than the usual disgusted look your instructor gives you, you get a concerned one. You turn your back and leave the classroom. You’re useless like this, and being useless is the exact opposite of being a legislacerator. You’ve thought it over all day while you lay in your sopor, and you eventually decided that your best course of action was to, very simply, kiss the girl.

It’s so dumb.

Stupid stupid stupid! But maybe it will give you some piece of mind. You didn’t come here for dating problems, after all. You’d come here to be deadly and awesome! The very best! You are the hand of justice, and right now the hand of justice really wants to kiss a troll, is there anything wrong with that? (Yes.) (Shut up!)

You slip into your dorm and find Terens exactly where you left her, which is asleep in her sopor. The lashes had given her more trouble than she had admitted, but she’d be fine in a few days, and in class again by tomorrow. That test was all you had scheduled tonight and you completely failed it, but you’d make it up later. For a second, you stand at the door and watch Terens breathe, and then you step deliberately to the side of her recuperacoon.

Hesitantly, you reach a claw out and trace it down her cheek.

“Vedris…” she whispers, voice broken, and you draw your paw back like it stings. You knew it was stupid, you knew it.

She cracks an eye open and stares you down. Your flap twitches, and her eyes narrow the slightest bit. Now or never Pyrope, now or never.

You dip down and kiss her, hard, and then you bite the living hell out of her lower lip.

“Ow!” She howls, and flails herself into a sitting position. “What the hell, Pyrope?” She brings a finger to her mouth, dabs at the teal blood pouring out, and gives you a comically hurt look. The sudden movement set her back to bleeding again, and the blood pools on the surface of the sopor. Gross.

“You won’t win,” you say crisply. “Not when I am Terezi Pyrope, and I always will be!”

“So what,” she spits, “are you all black now?”

You cackle, because, oh god, did you ever have a fucking clue? “No. I couldn’t hate that pretty face! And I couldn’t pity it, that’s for goddamn sure. But you really do smell nice.”

Her eyes are dark discs hidden under her hair, but there’s humor bubbling in them somewhere, and it’s stupidly pleasant. You can’t help but laugh, and one corner of her flap twitches up.

“You have messages,” she says, and settles back into the bloody sopor. “Your husktop has been chiming all night.”

You go to check and, of course, they’re from Vriska.

AG: I’m not dead! 8ut I am suuuuuuuuper 8usy. 8ut I guess I can spare a few minutes for you.

AG: Terezi?

AG: Tereeeeeeeezi!

AG: Fine, I guess you’re still 8eing a chump at law school!!!!!!!!

You can’t help but giggle a little. Spare a few minutes for you? Those messages were spaced out over an hour, she’s clearly bored out of her mind wherever she is, and actually wants to talk to you.

GC: N3V3RM1ND!

GC: 1 FOUND 4 B3TT3R 1D1OT TO SP3ND MY T1M3 ON

AG: >::::O

GC: >:]

“Hey,” Terens says, peering over the edge of her recuperacoon. Her hair is a mess. “Didn’t you have a paper to write?”

You freeze. “Oh shit!”

Terens laughs as you hurriedly bring up the document. “You’re so dumb!”

"Shut up! Who’s the one bleeding right now? Not me.”

She winks. “I’m bleeding because I won.”

You make a face. “Bluh bluh bluh.”

-

It’s been two months since you waxed all pale for Terens, and you’re currently top of your class, because you are awesome and useful, the exact two things a legislacerator is supposed to be. Terens is two ranks below you and forever bitter about it.

“Hurry up!” You yell down at her.

“Fuck you!” she calls back up. She’s missing a finger and a good chunk of her hair is burned off, and that only makes you laugh. Shouldn’t mess with explosives! Even if they did make this mission possible.

You’re on a ladder, which is on fire at the bottom, and at the top is the control room and captain. You’ll need him alive, just long enough to give you the information you need.

He’s waiting for you of course, but you didn’t get shot in every joint you owned just to go down to some crapshot. The bullet whizzes by your head and you give him your very best smile.

“A word of advice, mustard face!” You call out. His eyes are huge, and his claws are clicking nervously on the handle of his useless gun. “Always take careful aim.”

Terens pulls herself up behind you, and you can already hear the sizzle of one of her bombs.

“Best hurry,” she says. “Time’s about up and I need this grade just as much as you do.”

“Right!” You say. “GIve it up, c’mon mustard face.”

Terens scoops him up easily, grinning lazily, and takes a claw  to his eye. He shrieks.

“Tell us where it’s at and I won’t remove your eye! And we’ll let you off the ship.”

“My… my… my front pocket!” He says desperately. His voice breaks on “pocket.”

“Good boy,” she purrs, and produces a tiny black chip. “Also, I lied.” She shoves him down and jumps all the way down to where you’d come from. You follow with equal abandon. Everything is on fire, including part of you, but that’s alright because you won’t be for long.

“Ten seconds!” Terens yells behind her, and then jumps off the ship entirely, directly into the lake it’s flying over. You follow with, you just can’t help yourself, a tidy little backflip. By the time you’re in the water the ship explodes overhead, and Terens laughs, too long and too loud.

“We are fucking awesome,” she says, and you can’t help but agree.

 

-


End file.
